EU must withdraw from WTO and develop closer ties with Arab countries;
EU must formally state that the USA must withdraw from IRaq and all military bases in the region;
redirect economy and budgets away from war and weapons production and BUILD INSTEAD a Europe and a region open to all and pursuing social equity and social harmony as equals.
EU must formally state that the USA must withdraw from IRaq and all military bases in the region;
redirect economy and budgets away from war and weapons production and BUILD INSTEAD a Europe and a region open to all and pursuing social equity and social harmony as equals.
sOMKE DAY WE WILL BURN ALL THE CARS OF THE wORLD
PLEASE SEND ME TO FRANCE – i WANT TO BE THE LIASON BETWEEN THE YOUTH BURNING IN THE STREETS AND THE REST OF CIVIL COSIETY...
I can Write – Shoot the story… I am ready…
Demands of the French Youth (There will be more!!!)
Paris Uprising 2005
Now that youth have the power and world stage they make real demands for all of us:
AMNESTY for all those arrested in the disturbances in last 2 weeks;
USA must join the ICC and give up its security council veto;
EU must withdraw from WTO and develop closer ties with Arab countries;
EU must formally state that the USA must withdraw from IRaq and all military bases in the region;
redirect economy and budgets away from war and weapons production and BUILD INSTEAD a Europe and a region open to all and pursuing social equity and social harmony as equals.
Liberty or Chaos
What is wrong with modern anarchists and people who imagine they are radicals???
The poor and marginalized people of France are doing what all of us should be doing – rioting. Since politics is constrained and perverted into the nothingness of styling the free market gods – We Should All Say Non! – NO! – And we should organize – like the youth gangs surrounding Paris, Dijon, La Paz and Bogota have.
The situation in the streets of France today is much as the USA in the 1960s. The moderate activists and careerist politicians ignored the people and the world for as long as they could: “ while the Black bourgeoisie 'couldn't understand' the meaning of Malcolm's loss, Black poor and working class people certainly could. He was one of *us*, they reasoned, and his loss was our loss.Malcolm's sharp, biting, and uncompromising criticism of White America, and the hypocrisy of its political leaders when it came to Black folks wasn't lost on Rev. King.
According to theological scholar James H. Cone, Martin, in private, couldn't help but identify with much of Malcolm's insights:
Among close associates and friends King did not hesitate to concede the truth of Malcolm's analysis of the black condition. He reportedly said to a friend: "I just saw Malcolm on television. I can't deny it. When he starts talking about all that's been done to us, I get a twinge of hate, of identification with him." [From: James H. Cone, *Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare* (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991), p. 256].
It has been 40 years since a ruckus erupted in the Audubon, and gunmen slew Malcolm X in front of his family and followers.He still continues to speak to new generations, who find in him, the resistance of distant ancestors, the anger and resentment of a people who know, in their hearts, that they were not dealt with fairly, and the necessity of self-defense against a system that is in perpetual war with Black America.
His life inspired a generation of young men and women to form and expand the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, the All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party, and myriad other groups. He brought countless white youth out of the cages of white liberalism and into movements for social justice and liberation. In a recent, somewhat amazing example, that of John Walker Lindh, who joined the Taliban in Afghanistan, his trek into the Third World began in the pages of *The Autobiography of Malcolm X*.
It has been generations, yet his voice continues to echo anew
Comments on the revolution from a French Professor:
Islamization" and "distress" or popular revolt? How the French Left Decieves us all
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who revolted in Clichy under Bois? Or in France May 68.
Is the revolution wanted, or it is not wanted?
In fact the masses make the history, and either one is with them, or one is against them.
The fight exists and those which would prefer it "differently" show that makes some they are afraid of it or do not want it.
This time it is a question of the most exploited youth, that which in addition to being proletarian daily faces massive and generalized racism.
This youth in rebellion is with the avant-garde of the class struggle in France, it is against reform, it is the expression of total antagonism between the proletariat and capitalism.
The reactionaries of the right and the left try to choke that, they claim that the revolt does not have any bond with the "French company"
There is thus the weapon of racism, in order to divide and to reign.
It is the argument of "the Islamization of France", like says Philippe de Villiers who speaks about "" ethnique civil war", the key word, the cause of all the causes: the bankruptcy of a massive and uncontrolled immigration policy ". Coldly combined with the ex National Front Jacques Bompard, they went to the Seine Saint-Denis to link and form a "national collective of the elected officials of the Republic against the voting rights from abroad"
The PEN considers that: " the agents and the symbols of the State, it is France itself which is attacked, by hordes which the laws know should not any more prevent us from expelling like foreigners."
Here is the fascistic policy: to divide the masses into distilling racism!
This racist propaganda is also associated the criminalisation of the "dangerous classes"
For the reactionaries it is a question of making believe that the revolt starts from a tradition of gangster to adapt a territory. It is the unceasingly repeated word, the "territory of the bands", like said by Sarkozy said in Argenteuil, where a stone rain had accommodated it after his remarks on the "rabbles" and the "Karcher."
The young people regard their city as their own – where they do or do not choose to battle the ruling classes..
The police force, in their eyes, is only one rival band.
Individuals consider that it is the occasion to mark a territory while fighting against the police force. These are territories of secession.
The speeches of the French Capitalist authorities aim at "making fear", to give hegemony to the suburban middle class. It is for that that one finds the same speech at the French Left (which benefits from the spoiled trade unions).
The left of the "PCF" and Arlette Laguiller agree: "the principal victims of these violences are the inhabitants of these suburbs" (Arlette Laguiller), "for lack of a political analysis (...) of the young people are sometimes reduced by it to unacceptable aggressions against peace, the safety and the goods of the paid population" (left of the "PCF" - the PRCF).
Arlette Laguiller does not hesitate to say that violence results from the hooligans or traffickers.
But even if this were true, why do they find today the support of many the young people?
Why the explosions of violence against the police ?"
All the legalists (moderates, fake leftists) say the same thing: "They are not the modest cars and the HLM of the workmen, reprocessed and the unemployed who should be set fire to, it is capitalism" (left "PCF" - the PRCF).
"the wave of revolt and violences which shakes today the popular suburbs and districts causes a major concern among the population" (LCR)
All of that is only a pretext to reject the fight.
The War in the Streets
The burnt cars are in the zone where the young people consider that they can fight, without going in a zone where they could be made to stop easily.
Many cars were burnt in front of the prefectures like certain personal cars of persons in charge for the State (mayors PCF like UMP), of the police stations were attacked (in Aulnay, Antony, etc.) as well as agencies of the post office or a Renault dealer; on several occasions of the shots were drawn against the police force (as in Courneuve), of the journalists were taken with part and their cars set fire to, the shopping centre of Bobigny 2 "was vandalisé", etc.
Is the revolution wanted, or it is not wanted?
In fact the masses make the history, and either one is with them, or one is against them.
The fight exists and those which would prefer it "differently" show that makes some they are afraid of it or do not want it.
Or to take an example, the LCR invited "the whole of the forces of left and democratic" to a meeting "to consider an emergency initiative which could take the form of a peaceful walk on the basis of the districts to require the resignation of Sarkozy and measurements necessary to a social, interdependent and collective life"!
Does one need a "peaceful walk" in an electoral prospect or revolutionary fight against the State?
One cannot marginalise this violence which to lies inside our cities, our houses, our campaigns… It will be necessary is to become aware of the nonsense of our system which does not have anything human that exists in it or is possible from it (the modern system). Only violence and the images of burning materialism can express this deaf violence of our times and our sins…
Riots in France spread to 270 Towns!!
The riots that have now been going for 11 days spread to 270 towns towns in france (reports yahoo news) with others dispossed people of the ghettos joining in in some of the worst (read best!) riots in years.
Also berlin, belgium and bremen there were dozens of cars set on fire in apparent solidarity actions.
A report I snatched off Italy IMC, where an eyewitness speaks of youths chanting "Sarkozy fasciste! Sarkozy fasciste! Sarkozy fasciste!..".
*Sarhozy is the french interior minister who has called the ghetto dwellers "scum". A campaign of antaganisation which started in July of this year between security forces (CRS) and residents (mainly young north africans)
Over 200 people involved with rocks, molotovs and baseball bats hospitalised upwards of 30 cops. Two cops were shot with live ammunition. Over 390 people arrested.
BACKGROUND ON FRENCH REVOULTION of 2005 – 2006
Africans living and working in Paris have been pushed into ghettoized suburbs of Paris (banlieue), where the state has withdrawn education, health, and other services, while increasing police presence, checkpoints, raids on sans-papiers and levels of oppression in general. This week the suburbs have exploded.
The trigger came on Thursday, October 27th, 2005, as a group of 10 highschool kids were playing soccer in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. When police arrived to do ID checks, the kids ran away and hid, because some of them had no ID. Three of the children hid in an electrical transformer building of EDF and were electrocuted. Two of them, Ziad Benn (17) and Banou Traoré (15), died; the third, Metin (21), was severely injured.
On Saturday morning, 1000 joined in a march organised by religious associations and mosques in Clichy-sous-Bois. Representatives of the Muslim community appealed for calm and marchers wore T-shirts saying mort pour rien ("dead for nothing"). The mayor of Clichy, Claude Dilain, called for an enquiry into the deaths of the two boys. All eyes were on Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. The response? As people were gathering in the mosques for the Night of Destiny, the most sacred night in the month of Ramadan, a night people usually spent at the mosque, the empty streets of the Cité du Chêne Pointu filled with about 400 CRS militant riot police and gendarmes, blocking off the neighborhood. Yet very few people allowed themselves to be provoked into breaking the sanctity of this night, despite racist insults from the police.
On Sunday, however, provocation turned into outrage as the women's prayer room at de Bousquets mosque was teargassed by police. As people stumbled out gasping for air, the policemen called the women "whores", "bitches" and other insults.
[ Reports from Paris IMC (fr): one | two | three | four ] [ Eyewitness account in English: UK IMC kersplebedeb ]
Ever since that night, Clichy-sous-Bois has been burning, with the insurrection spreading on Monday to Seine-Saint-Denis and on Tuesday night (November 1st) to nine other Parisian suburbs. A week after the death of the two boys, the uprising is spreading throughout France -- to Dijon, Bouches-du-Rhone and Rouen.
In a press conference held on Monday, community-based activists named the causes of the continuing unrest: "Clichy is one of the poorest municipalities in France and community groups have less and less money to work with." Things are tense as the press conference draws to a close: young people share their stories, women explain what they experienced and saw first hand. A common theme in all these accounts is anger at the police, who are carrying out more and more foolish - and often illegal - "muscular" interventions, and at the authorities in the ministry who are not condemning the gas attack against the mosque.
There was a consensus that, in order to calm things down, the police should leave the area... instead, Minister Sarkozy has announced a "zero tolerance" policy, labelling the suburban youth as "scum" and vowing to "clean out" troubled suburbs. Sarkozy's position has divided the cabinet, with Prime Minister de Villepin apparently rebuking Mr Sarkozy.
A firefighter walks past the ruins of a Renault car dealership in Aulnay-sous-Bois, east of Paris, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005 after it was destroyed overnight by a raging fire, in the latest night of rioting in suburban Paris. A kindergarten, a gymnasium, government offices and hundreds of cars have been torched over the past week by youths in largely immigrant areas who began rampaging after two of their peers were electrocuted at a power substation while hiding from police they feared were chasing them. (AP Photo/Jacques Brinon)
Paris-Area Riots Gain Dangerous Momentum
AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, France - A week of riots in poor neighborhoods outside Paris gained dangerous new momentum Thursday, with youths shooting at police and firefighters and attacking trains and symbols of the French state.
Facing mounting criticism, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin vowed to restore order as the violence that erupted Oct. 27 spread to at least 20 towns, highlighting the frustration simmering in housing projects that are home to many North African immigrants.
Unrest flared for an eighth straight night Thursday, though scaled down from previous says. Young men fire buckshot at riot police vehicles in Neuilly-sur-Marne, while a group of 30 to 40 harassed police near a synagogue further east in Stains, said the top official of Seine-Saint-Denis, Prefect Jean-Francois Cordet.
A special Interior Ministry operations center monitoring the violence said some 60 vehicles torched in the Seine-Saint-Denis region by early Friday and a total of 165 throughout the Paris metropolitan area. Some 40 vehicles were torched in the Val d'Oise area northwest of Paris.
The sporadic incidents were less intense that the ferocious rioting that erupted eight days ago in Clichy-sous-Bois and spread across the troubled area of housing projects marked by soaring unemployment, delinquency and a sense of despair.
"I will not accept organized gangs making the law in some neighborhoods. I will not accept having crime networks and drug trafficking profiting from disorder," Villepin said at the Senate in between emergency meetings called over the riots.
The unrest cast a cloud over the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. In Clichy-sous-Bois — heart of the rioting — men filled the Bilal mosque for evening prayers, but streets were subdued with shops shutting early.
"Look around you. How do you think we can celebrate?" said Abdallah Hammo as he closed the tea house where he works.
Riots erupted in an outburst of anger in Clichy-sous-Bois over the accidental electrocution Oct. 27 of two teenagers who fled a soccer game and hid in a power substation when they saw police enter the area. Youths in the neighborhood suspect that police chased Traore Bouna, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, to their deaths.
Since then riots have swelled into a broader challenge against the French state and its security forces. The violence has exposed deep discontent in neighborhoods where African and Muslim immigrants and their French-born children are trapped by poverty, unemployment, racial discrimination, crime, poor education and housing.
The Interior Ministry released a preliminary report Thursday exonerating officers of any direct role in the teenagers' deaths. Some 1,300 officers were being deployed in Seine-Saint-Denis, a tough northeastern area that includes the town of Clichy-sous-Bois and has seen the worst violence.
The report said police went to Clichy-sous-Bois to investigate a suspected intrusion on a building site but did not chase the teenagers who were killed. A third teenager who was seriously injured also told investigators he and the other boys were aware of the dangers when they hid in the substation, which was fenced off, the report said.
The report did not address why the youths ran when officers came to the neighborhood, but it said Benna was known to police for having committed robbery with violence and Bouna was among those who had intruded onto the building site.His father, Amor Benna, told The Associated Press that he and the other teenagers' families have filed a legal complaint to try to determine whether "a mistake was made by security forces. We want to know the circumstances that led to his death."
Official assurances that police were not directly responsible for the deaths have not stemmed the unrest, which authorities said spread Wednesday night to at least 20 Paris-region towns. Government offices, a police station, a primary school and a college, a Clichy-sous-Bois fire station and a train station were among the buildings targeted.
Rioters also set fire to a gym near the Les Tilleuls housing complex in the Seine-Saint-Denis region. It burned and smoldered Wednesday night as residents looked on in despair.
"Where is she going to practice now?" asked Mohammed Fawzi Kaci, an Algerian immigrant whose 8-year-old daughter took gymnastics classes at the facility.
The violence also has cast doubt on the success of France's model of seeking to integrate its immigrant community — its Muslim population, at an estimated 5 million, is Western Europe's largest — by playing down differences between ethnic groups. Rather than feeling embraced as full and equal citizens, immigrants and their French-born children often complain of police harassment and of being refused jobs, housing and opportunities.
"It is very tough when you are stuck midway between France and Algeria or Morocco," said Sonia Imloul, who works with troubled teens in Seine-Saint-Denis and was born in France of Algerian parents. She added: "Perhaps we should be told clearly to stop having children, because they have an 80 percent chance of not succeeding."
On Thursday, rioters fired four shots at police and firefighters but caused no injuries, said Jean-Francois Cordet, the top government official for Seine-Saint-Denis. Nine people were injured in other unrest and 315 cars were torched across the Paris area, officials said.
Traffic was halted Thursday morning on a commuter line linking Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport after stone-throwing rioters attacked two trains. A passenger was slightly injured by broken glass. Police have made 143 arrests during the unrest, Interior Ministry Nicolas Sarkozy said.
Residents and opposition politicians have accused Sarkozy of fanning tensions with his tough police tactics and talk — including calling troublemakers "scum."
"Sarkozy's language has added oil to the fire. He should really weigh his words," said Kaci, whose daughter lost her gym. "I'm proud to live in France, but this France disappoints me." Associated Press writers John Leicester, Scheherezade Faramarzi, Joelle Diderich and Cecile Brisson in Paris contributed to this report.
The government is entirely mobilized. Its immediate priority is to restore public order, and restore it without delay," de Villepin said.
Muslim leaders at Clichy-sous-Bois' mosque, meanwhile, prayed for peace and asked parents to keep teenagers off the streets after skirmishes broke out after two teenage boys were electrocuted last Thursday while hiding in a power substation because they believed police were chasing them.
The unrest spread to at least nine Paris-region towns overnight Tuesday, exposing the despair, anger and criminality in France's poor suburbs — fertile terrain for Islamic extremists, drug dealers and racketeers.
The violence, concentrated in neighborhoods with large African and Muslim populations, has highlighted the difficulties many European nations face with immigrant communities feeling marginalized and restive, cut off from the continent's prosperity and, for some extremists, its values, too.
"They have no work. They have nothing to do. Put yourself in their place," said Abderrahmane Bouhout, president of the Clichy-sous-Bois mosque, where a tear gas grenade exploded Sunday evening. Local youths suspected a police attack, and authorities are investigating.
The violence cast doubt on the success of France's model of seeking to integrate its large immigrant community — its Muslim population, at an estimated 5 million, is Western Europe's largest — by playing down differences between ethnic groups. But rather than be embraced as full and equal citizens, immigrants and their French-born children often complain of police harassment and of being refused jobs, housing and opportunities.
"If French society accepts these tinderboxes in its society, it cannot be surprised when they explode," said Claude Dilain, the Socialist mayor of the Clichy-sous-Bois suburb.
Eric, a 22-year-old in Clichy-sous-Bois who was born in France to Moroccan parents, said police target those with dark skin. He said he has been unable to find full-time work for two years and that the riots were a demonstration of suburban solidarity.
"People are joining together to say we've had enough," he said. He refused to give his surname because talking to reporters was poorly regarded in his neighborhood.
"We live in ghettos," he added. "Everyone lives in fear."
Many immigrant families are trapped in housing projects that were built to accommodate foreign laborers welcomed by post-World War II France but have since succumbed to despair, chronic unemployment and lawlessness. In some neighborhoods, drug dealers and racketeers hold sway and experts say Islamic radicals seek to recruit disenchanted youths by telling them that France has abandoned them.
"French society is in a bad state ... increasingly unequal, increasingly segregated, and increasingly divided along ethnic and racial lines," said sociologist Manuel Boucher. Some youths turn to Islam to claim an identity that is not French, "to seize on something which gives them back their individual and collective dignity."
French governments have injected funds and job-creation schemes for years but failed to cure ills in suburbs where car-burnings and other crimes are daily facts of life.
"No matter what the politicians say, some neighborhoods are all but lost," said Patrice Ribeiro, national secretary of the Synergie police officers' union. "Police patrols pass through but without stopping and with their windows rolled up." Police said 180 vehicles were torched overnight Tuesday, most in the Seine-Saint-Denis region that includes Clichy, Aulnay and other violence-hit neighborhoods. Police made 35 arrests in Seine-Saint-Denis. Youths lobbed Molotov cocktails near Aulnay's town hall and threw stones at the firehouse. In nearby Bondy, a blaze engulfed a store.
Officials said police were harassed by "small, very mobile gangs."
De Villepin postponed a visit to Canada and Sarkozy canceled a trip next week to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
President Jacques Chirac told a weekly Cabinet meeting that "the law must be applied firmly" but "in a spirit of dialogue and respect" to prevent "a dangerous situation" from developing.
Chirac acknowledged the "profound frustrations" of troubled neighborhoods but said violence is not the answer and that efforts must be stepped up to combat it.
"Zones without law cannot exist in the republic," he said.
In Aulnay-sous-Bois, another northeastern suburb where riot police fired rubber bullets at advancing gangs of youths Tuesday night, workers cleaned up charred debris Wednesday. A group of teenagers chased and threw stones at Associated Press reporters, some shouting "Go home!" and others yelling: "See you tonight."
"I am afraid. I have children," said Aulnay resident Houcine Yahiaoui, who watched the violence from his windows. "I have never seen anything like this here."
Or take a look at Russia and Moscow
– The decadence of the West spreads in all directions:
MOSCOW - "My name is Skeleton. I am 100 years old. What do I do? I steal. Where I am from? I am from under the platform."
"Skeleton" is Alyosha. He is in fact 14 years old. And what he "does," in addition to petty theft, is sniff glue and live by his wits, one abandoned child among multitudes just like him struggling by the hour to remain among the living on the particularly mean streets of Moscow.
Along with dozens of other street children, Alyosha lives in the Hammer and Sickle train station and his childhood bedroom is a dank, bleak concrete space behind a cellar window, reeking of urine and glue.
He was initially sent to a state orphanage after his alcoholic parents were deprived of their rights over him. There was little anyone could do to stop him from fleeing that institution and making the streets of the Russian capital his home.
Such cases are frequent in Russia, says Ramil Gutov, a doctor with the humanitarian relief organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), or Doctors without Borders.
Since 2004, the Belgian branch of MSF has been running a program to help Moscow's thousands of street children, left to fend for themselves after their families disintegrated.
Gutov's work includes trying to convince Alyosha and his group of children to come and have themselves examined by medical staff at the day care center MSF runs in the south of Moscow, a place where children can also wash their clothes and talk to psychologists.
There are over a million street children across Russia (in Russian, "bezprizornye," literally, left without supervision), according to official figures. The numbers soared in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Some are the children of homeless parents. Others come from alcoholic families where they still officially live, although they are actually left on their own and do not go to school anymore, like Olya, a 17-year-old girl who spends her nights at Moscow's Kursk station.
"My mother is a trolleybus driver in Pavlovsky Posad, one hour away from Moscow. I come back home once a week to change clothes," Olya says as she squats in a corridor of Kursk station.
"My mother wants to live alone, that is why I come here. She doesn't give a damn whether I come back home or not," she says as an MSF doctor cleans an infected wound in the crook of her arm caused by a syringe, and convinces her to come have herself examined at MSF's center.
For years, Olya has been living on the street, surviving on petty theft and prostitution.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, "the state used to do a lot for children, but this country has undergone a very deep social shock," says Marina Makhtinova, an education specialist at the MSF center.
Meanwhile, at Kursk station, the small community of street children has managed to organized itself on some level. Some station employees help them, like Zhenya, who acts as their unofficial -- and free -- barber.
And some children do odd jobs in the station, like 16-year-old Timur, who has been living here for three years with his grandmother, and acts as the night waiting room's guard, cashing in and keeping for himself -- with the agreement of the station's staff -- the 40 rubles (1.4 dollars, 1.1 euros) people pay to spend the night there.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051102/lf_afp/russiasocietychildren
I can Write – Shoot the story… I am ready…
Demands of the French Youth (There will be more!!!)
Paris Uprising 2005
Now that youth have the power and world stage they make real demands for all of us:
AMNESTY for all those arrested in the disturbances in last 2 weeks;
USA must join the ICC and give up its security council veto;
EU must withdraw from WTO and develop closer ties with Arab countries;
EU must formally state that the USA must withdraw from IRaq and all military bases in the region;
redirect economy and budgets away from war and weapons production and BUILD INSTEAD a Europe and a region open to all and pursuing social equity and social harmony as equals.
Liberty or Chaos
What is wrong with modern anarchists and people who imagine they are radicals???
The poor and marginalized people of France are doing what all of us should be doing – rioting. Since politics is constrained and perverted into the nothingness of styling the free market gods – We Should All Say Non! – NO! – And we should organize – like the youth gangs surrounding Paris, Dijon, La Paz and Bogota have.
The situation in the streets of France today is much as the USA in the 1960s. The moderate activists and careerist politicians ignored the people and the world for as long as they could: “ while the Black bourgeoisie 'couldn't understand' the meaning of Malcolm's loss, Black poor and working class people certainly could. He was one of *us*, they reasoned, and his loss was our loss.Malcolm's sharp, biting, and uncompromising criticism of White America, and the hypocrisy of its political leaders when it came to Black folks wasn't lost on Rev. King.
According to theological scholar James H. Cone, Martin, in private, couldn't help but identify with much of Malcolm's insights:
Among close associates and friends King did not hesitate to concede the truth of Malcolm's analysis of the black condition. He reportedly said to a friend: "I just saw Malcolm on television. I can't deny it. When he starts talking about all that's been done to us, I get a twinge of hate, of identification with him." [From: James H. Cone, *Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare* (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991), p. 256].
It has been 40 years since a ruckus erupted in the Audubon, and gunmen slew Malcolm X in front of his family and followers.He still continues to speak to new generations, who find in him, the resistance of distant ancestors, the anger and resentment of a people who know, in their hearts, that they were not dealt with fairly, and the necessity of self-defense against a system that is in perpetual war with Black America.
His life inspired a generation of young men and women to form and expand the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, the All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party, and myriad other groups. He brought countless white youth out of the cages of white liberalism and into movements for social justice and liberation. In a recent, somewhat amazing example, that of John Walker Lindh, who joined the Taliban in Afghanistan, his trek into the Third World began in the pages of *The Autobiography of Malcolm X*.
It has been generations, yet his voice continues to echo anew
Comments on the revolution from a French Professor:
Islamization" and "distress" or popular revolt? How the French Left Decieves us all
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who revolted in Clichy under Bois? Or in France May 68.
Is the revolution wanted, or it is not wanted?
In fact the masses make the history, and either one is with them, or one is against them.
The fight exists and those which would prefer it "differently" show that makes some they are afraid of it or do not want it.
This time it is a question of the most exploited youth, that which in addition to being proletarian daily faces massive and generalized racism.
This youth in rebellion is with the avant-garde of the class struggle in France, it is against reform, it is the expression of total antagonism between the proletariat and capitalism.
The reactionaries of the right and the left try to choke that, they claim that the revolt does not have any bond with the "French company"
There is thus the weapon of racism, in order to divide and to reign.
It is the argument of "the Islamization of France", like says Philippe de Villiers who speaks about "" ethnique civil war", the key word, the cause of all the causes: the bankruptcy of a massive and uncontrolled immigration policy ". Coldly combined with the ex National Front Jacques Bompard, they went to the Seine Saint-Denis to link and form a "national collective of the elected officials of the Republic against the voting rights from abroad"
The PEN considers that: " the agents and the symbols of the State, it is France itself which is attacked, by hordes which the laws know should not any more prevent us from expelling like foreigners."
Here is the fascistic policy: to divide the masses into distilling racism!
This racist propaganda is also associated the criminalisation of the "dangerous classes"
For the reactionaries it is a question of making believe that the revolt starts from a tradition of gangster to adapt a territory. It is the unceasingly repeated word, the "territory of the bands", like said by Sarkozy said in Argenteuil, where a stone rain had accommodated it after his remarks on the "rabbles" and the "Karcher."
The young people regard their city as their own – where they do or do not choose to battle the ruling classes..
The police force, in their eyes, is only one rival band.
Individuals consider that it is the occasion to mark a territory while fighting against the police force. These are territories of secession.
The speeches of the French Capitalist authorities aim at "making fear", to give hegemony to the suburban middle class. It is for that that one finds the same speech at the French Left (which benefits from the spoiled trade unions).
The left of the "PCF" and Arlette Laguiller agree: "the principal victims of these violences are the inhabitants of these suburbs" (Arlette Laguiller), "for lack of a political analysis (...) of the young people are sometimes reduced by it to unacceptable aggressions against peace, the safety and the goods of the paid population" (left of the "PCF" - the PRCF).
Arlette Laguiller does not hesitate to say that violence results from the hooligans or traffickers.
But even if this were true, why do they find today the support of many the young people?
Why the explosions of violence against the police ?"
All the legalists (moderates, fake leftists) say the same thing: "They are not the modest cars and the HLM of the workmen, reprocessed and the unemployed who should be set fire to, it is capitalism" (left "PCF" - the PRCF).
"the wave of revolt and violences which shakes today the popular suburbs and districts causes a major concern among the population" (LCR)
All of that is only a pretext to reject the fight.
The War in the Streets
The burnt cars are in the zone where the young people consider that they can fight, without going in a zone where they could be made to stop easily.
Many cars were burnt in front of the prefectures like certain personal cars of persons in charge for the State (mayors PCF like UMP), of the police stations were attacked (in Aulnay, Antony, etc.) as well as agencies of the post office or a Renault dealer; on several occasions of the shots were drawn against the police force (as in Courneuve), of the journalists were taken with part and their cars set fire to, the shopping centre of Bobigny 2 "was vandalisé", etc.
Is the revolution wanted, or it is not wanted?
In fact the masses make the history, and either one is with them, or one is against them.
The fight exists and those which would prefer it "differently" show that makes some they are afraid of it or do not want it.
Or to take an example, the LCR invited "the whole of the forces of left and democratic" to a meeting "to consider an emergency initiative which could take the form of a peaceful walk on the basis of the districts to require the resignation of Sarkozy and measurements necessary to a social, interdependent and collective life"!
Does one need a "peaceful walk" in an electoral prospect or revolutionary fight against the State?
One cannot marginalise this violence which to lies inside our cities, our houses, our campaigns… It will be necessary is to become aware of the nonsense of our system which does not have anything human that exists in it or is possible from it (the modern system). Only violence and the images of burning materialism can express this deaf violence of our times and our sins…
Riots in France spread to 270 Towns!!
The riots that have now been going for 11 days spread to 270 towns towns in france (reports yahoo news) with others dispossed people of the ghettos joining in in some of the worst (read best!) riots in years.
Also berlin, belgium and bremen there were dozens of cars set on fire in apparent solidarity actions.
A report I snatched off Italy IMC, where an eyewitness speaks of youths chanting "Sarkozy fasciste! Sarkozy fasciste! Sarkozy fasciste!..".
*Sarhozy is the french interior minister who has called the ghetto dwellers "scum". A campaign of antaganisation which started in July of this year between security forces (CRS) and residents (mainly young north africans)
Over 200 people involved with rocks, molotovs and baseball bats hospitalised upwards of 30 cops. Two cops were shot with live ammunition. Over 390 people arrested.
BACKGROUND ON FRENCH REVOULTION of 2005 – 2006
Africans living and working in Paris have been pushed into ghettoized suburbs of Paris (banlieue), where the state has withdrawn education, health, and other services, while increasing police presence, checkpoints, raids on sans-papiers and levels of oppression in general. This week the suburbs have exploded.
The trigger came on Thursday, October 27th, 2005, as a group of 10 highschool kids were playing soccer in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. When police arrived to do ID checks, the kids ran away and hid, because some of them had no ID. Three of the children hid in an electrical transformer building of EDF and were electrocuted. Two of them, Ziad Benn (17) and Banou Traoré (15), died; the third, Metin (21), was severely injured.
On Saturday morning, 1000 joined in a march organised by religious associations and mosques in Clichy-sous-Bois. Representatives of the Muslim community appealed for calm and marchers wore T-shirts saying mort pour rien ("dead for nothing"). The mayor of Clichy, Claude Dilain, called for an enquiry into the deaths of the two boys. All eyes were on Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. The response? As people were gathering in the mosques for the Night of Destiny, the most sacred night in the month of Ramadan, a night people usually spent at the mosque, the empty streets of the Cité du Chêne Pointu filled with about 400 CRS militant riot police and gendarmes, blocking off the neighborhood. Yet very few people allowed themselves to be provoked into breaking the sanctity of this night, despite racist insults from the police.
On Sunday, however, provocation turned into outrage as the women's prayer room at de Bousquets mosque was teargassed by police. As people stumbled out gasping for air, the policemen called the women "whores", "bitches" and other insults.
[ Reports from Paris IMC (fr): one | two | three | four ] [ Eyewitness account in English: UK IMC kersplebedeb ]
Ever since that night, Clichy-sous-Bois has been burning, with the insurrection spreading on Monday to Seine-Saint-Denis and on Tuesday night (November 1st) to nine other Parisian suburbs. A week after the death of the two boys, the uprising is spreading throughout France -- to Dijon, Bouches-du-Rhone and Rouen.
In a press conference held on Monday, community-based activists named the causes of the continuing unrest: "Clichy is one of the poorest municipalities in France and community groups have less and less money to work with." Things are tense as the press conference draws to a close: young people share their stories, women explain what they experienced and saw first hand. A common theme in all these accounts is anger at the police, who are carrying out more and more foolish - and often illegal - "muscular" interventions, and at the authorities in the ministry who are not condemning the gas attack against the mosque.
There was a consensus that, in order to calm things down, the police should leave the area... instead, Minister Sarkozy has announced a "zero tolerance" policy, labelling the suburban youth as "scum" and vowing to "clean out" troubled suburbs. Sarkozy's position has divided the cabinet, with Prime Minister de Villepin apparently rebuking Mr Sarkozy.
A firefighter walks past the ruins of a Renault car dealership in Aulnay-sous-Bois, east of Paris, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005 after it was destroyed overnight by a raging fire, in the latest night of rioting in suburban Paris. A kindergarten, a gymnasium, government offices and hundreds of cars have been torched over the past week by youths in largely immigrant areas who began rampaging after two of their peers were electrocuted at a power substation while hiding from police they feared were chasing them. (AP Photo/Jacques Brinon)
Paris-Area Riots Gain Dangerous Momentum
AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, France - A week of riots in poor neighborhoods outside Paris gained dangerous new momentum Thursday, with youths shooting at police and firefighters and attacking trains and symbols of the French state.
Facing mounting criticism, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin vowed to restore order as the violence that erupted Oct. 27 spread to at least 20 towns, highlighting the frustration simmering in housing projects that are home to many North African immigrants.
Unrest flared for an eighth straight night Thursday, though scaled down from previous says. Young men fire buckshot at riot police vehicles in Neuilly-sur-Marne, while a group of 30 to 40 harassed police near a synagogue further east in Stains, said the top official of Seine-Saint-Denis, Prefect Jean-Francois Cordet.
A special Interior Ministry operations center monitoring the violence said some 60 vehicles torched in the Seine-Saint-Denis region by early Friday and a total of 165 throughout the Paris metropolitan area. Some 40 vehicles were torched in the Val d'Oise area northwest of Paris.
The sporadic incidents were less intense that the ferocious rioting that erupted eight days ago in Clichy-sous-Bois and spread across the troubled area of housing projects marked by soaring unemployment, delinquency and a sense of despair.
"I will not accept organized gangs making the law in some neighborhoods. I will not accept having crime networks and drug trafficking profiting from disorder," Villepin said at the Senate in between emergency meetings called over the riots.
The unrest cast a cloud over the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. In Clichy-sous-Bois — heart of the rioting — men filled the Bilal mosque for evening prayers, but streets were subdued with shops shutting early.
"Look around you. How do you think we can celebrate?" said Abdallah Hammo as he closed the tea house where he works.
Riots erupted in an outburst of anger in Clichy-sous-Bois over the accidental electrocution Oct. 27 of two teenagers who fled a soccer game and hid in a power substation when they saw police enter the area. Youths in the neighborhood suspect that police chased Traore Bouna, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, to their deaths.
Since then riots have swelled into a broader challenge against the French state and its security forces. The violence has exposed deep discontent in neighborhoods where African and Muslim immigrants and their French-born children are trapped by poverty, unemployment, racial discrimination, crime, poor education and housing.
The Interior Ministry released a preliminary report Thursday exonerating officers of any direct role in the teenagers' deaths. Some 1,300 officers were being deployed in Seine-Saint-Denis, a tough northeastern area that includes the town of Clichy-sous-Bois and has seen the worst violence.
The report said police went to Clichy-sous-Bois to investigate a suspected intrusion on a building site but did not chase the teenagers who were killed. A third teenager who was seriously injured also told investigators he and the other boys were aware of the dangers when they hid in the substation, which was fenced off, the report said.
The report did not address why the youths ran when officers came to the neighborhood, but it said Benna was known to police for having committed robbery with violence and Bouna was among those who had intruded onto the building site.His father, Amor Benna, told The Associated Press that he and the other teenagers' families have filed a legal complaint to try to determine whether "a mistake was made by security forces. We want to know the circumstances that led to his death."
Official assurances that police were not directly responsible for the deaths have not stemmed the unrest, which authorities said spread Wednesday night to at least 20 Paris-region towns. Government offices, a police station, a primary school and a college, a Clichy-sous-Bois fire station and a train station were among the buildings targeted.
Rioters also set fire to a gym near the Les Tilleuls housing complex in the Seine-Saint-Denis region. It burned and smoldered Wednesday night as residents looked on in despair.
"Where is she going to practice now?" asked Mohammed Fawzi Kaci, an Algerian immigrant whose 8-year-old daughter took gymnastics classes at the facility.
The violence also has cast doubt on the success of France's model of seeking to integrate its immigrant community — its Muslim population, at an estimated 5 million, is Western Europe's largest — by playing down differences between ethnic groups. Rather than feeling embraced as full and equal citizens, immigrants and their French-born children often complain of police harassment and of being refused jobs, housing and opportunities.
"It is very tough when you are stuck midway between France and Algeria or Morocco," said Sonia Imloul, who works with troubled teens in Seine-Saint-Denis and was born in France of Algerian parents. She added: "Perhaps we should be told clearly to stop having children, because they have an 80 percent chance of not succeeding."
On Thursday, rioters fired four shots at police and firefighters but caused no injuries, said Jean-Francois Cordet, the top government official for Seine-Saint-Denis. Nine people were injured in other unrest and 315 cars were torched across the Paris area, officials said.
Traffic was halted Thursday morning on a commuter line linking Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport after stone-throwing rioters attacked two trains. A passenger was slightly injured by broken glass. Police have made 143 arrests during the unrest, Interior Ministry Nicolas Sarkozy said.
Residents and opposition politicians have accused Sarkozy of fanning tensions with his tough police tactics and talk — including calling troublemakers "scum."
"Sarkozy's language has added oil to the fire. He should really weigh his words," said Kaci, whose daughter lost her gym. "I'm proud to live in France, but this France disappoints me." Associated Press writers John Leicester, Scheherezade Faramarzi, Joelle Diderich and Cecile Brisson in Paris contributed to this report.
The government is entirely mobilized. Its immediate priority is to restore public order, and restore it without delay," de Villepin said.
Muslim leaders at Clichy-sous-Bois' mosque, meanwhile, prayed for peace and asked parents to keep teenagers off the streets after skirmishes broke out after two teenage boys were electrocuted last Thursday while hiding in a power substation because they believed police were chasing them.
The unrest spread to at least nine Paris-region towns overnight Tuesday, exposing the despair, anger and criminality in France's poor suburbs — fertile terrain for Islamic extremists, drug dealers and racketeers.
The violence, concentrated in neighborhoods with large African and Muslim populations, has highlighted the difficulties many European nations face with immigrant communities feeling marginalized and restive, cut off from the continent's prosperity and, for some extremists, its values, too.
"They have no work. They have nothing to do. Put yourself in their place," said Abderrahmane Bouhout, president of the Clichy-sous-Bois mosque, where a tear gas grenade exploded Sunday evening. Local youths suspected a police attack, and authorities are investigating.
The violence cast doubt on the success of France's model of seeking to integrate its large immigrant community — its Muslim population, at an estimated 5 million, is Western Europe's largest — by playing down differences between ethnic groups. But rather than be embraced as full and equal citizens, immigrants and their French-born children often complain of police harassment and of being refused jobs, housing and opportunities.
"If French society accepts these tinderboxes in its society, it cannot be surprised when they explode," said Claude Dilain, the Socialist mayor of the Clichy-sous-Bois suburb.
Eric, a 22-year-old in Clichy-sous-Bois who was born in France to Moroccan parents, said police target those with dark skin. He said he has been unable to find full-time work for two years and that the riots were a demonstration of suburban solidarity.
"People are joining together to say we've had enough," he said. He refused to give his surname because talking to reporters was poorly regarded in his neighborhood.
"We live in ghettos," he added. "Everyone lives in fear."
Many immigrant families are trapped in housing projects that were built to accommodate foreign laborers welcomed by post-World War II France but have since succumbed to despair, chronic unemployment and lawlessness. In some neighborhoods, drug dealers and racketeers hold sway and experts say Islamic radicals seek to recruit disenchanted youths by telling them that France has abandoned them.
"French society is in a bad state ... increasingly unequal, increasingly segregated, and increasingly divided along ethnic and racial lines," said sociologist Manuel Boucher. Some youths turn to Islam to claim an identity that is not French, "to seize on something which gives them back their individual and collective dignity."
French governments have injected funds and job-creation schemes for years but failed to cure ills in suburbs where car-burnings and other crimes are daily facts of life.
"No matter what the politicians say, some neighborhoods are all but lost," said Patrice Ribeiro, national secretary of the Synergie police officers' union. "Police patrols pass through but without stopping and with their windows rolled up." Police said 180 vehicles were torched overnight Tuesday, most in the Seine-Saint-Denis region that includes Clichy, Aulnay and other violence-hit neighborhoods. Police made 35 arrests in Seine-Saint-Denis. Youths lobbed Molotov cocktails near Aulnay's town hall and threw stones at the firehouse. In nearby Bondy, a blaze engulfed a store.
Officials said police were harassed by "small, very mobile gangs."
De Villepin postponed a visit to Canada and Sarkozy canceled a trip next week to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
President Jacques Chirac told a weekly Cabinet meeting that "the law must be applied firmly" but "in a spirit of dialogue and respect" to prevent "a dangerous situation" from developing.
Chirac acknowledged the "profound frustrations" of troubled neighborhoods but said violence is not the answer and that efforts must be stepped up to combat it.
"Zones without law cannot exist in the republic," he said.
In Aulnay-sous-Bois, another northeastern suburb where riot police fired rubber bullets at advancing gangs of youths Tuesday night, workers cleaned up charred debris Wednesday. A group of teenagers chased and threw stones at Associated Press reporters, some shouting "Go home!" and others yelling: "See you tonight."
"I am afraid. I have children," said Aulnay resident Houcine Yahiaoui, who watched the violence from his windows. "I have never seen anything like this here."
Or take a look at Russia and Moscow
– The decadence of the West spreads in all directions:
MOSCOW - "My name is Skeleton. I am 100 years old. What do I do? I steal. Where I am from? I am from under the platform."
"Skeleton" is Alyosha. He is in fact 14 years old. And what he "does," in addition to petty theft, is sniff glue and live by his wits, one abandoned child among multitudes just like him struggling by the hour to remain among the living on the particularly mean streets of Moscow.
Along with dozens of other street children, Alyosha lives in the Hammer and Sickle train station and his childhood bedroom is a dank, bleak concrete space behind a cellar window, reeking of urine and glue.
He was initially sent to a state orphanage after his alcoholic parents were deprived of their rights over him. There was little anyone could do to stop him from fleeing that institution and making the streets of the Russian capital his home.
Such cases are frequent in Russia, says Ramil Gutov, a doctor with the humanitarian relief organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), or Doctors without Borders.
Since 2004, the Belgian branch of MSF has been running a program to help Moscow's thousands of street children, left to fend for themselves after their families disintegrated.
Gutov's work includes trying to convince Alyosha and his group of children to come and have themselves examined by medical staff at the day care center MSF runs in the south of Moscow, a place where children can also wash their clothes and talk to psychologists.
There are over a million street children across Russia (in Russian, "bezprizornye," literally, left without supervision), according to official figures. The numbers soared in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Some are the children of homeless parents. Others come from alcoholic families where they still officially live, although they are actually left on their own and do not go to school anymore, like Olya, a 17-year-old girl who spends her nights at Moscow's Kursk station.
"My mother is a trolleybus driver in Pavlovsky Posad, one hour away from Moscow. I come back home once a week to change clothes," Olya says as she squats in a corridor of Kursk station.
"My mother wants to live alone, that is why I come here. She doesn't give a damn whether I come back home or not," she says as an MSF doctor cleans an infected wound in the crook of her arm caused by a syringe, and convinces her to come have herself examined at MSF's center.
For years, Olya has been living on the street, surviving on petty theft and prostitution.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, "the state used to do a lot for children, but this country has undergone a very deep social shock," says Marina Makhtinova, an education specialist at the MSF center.
Meanwhile, at Kursk station, the small community of street children has managed to organized itself on some level. Some station employees help them, like Zhenya, who acts as their unofficial -- and free -- barber.
And some children do odd jobs in the station, like 16-year-old Timur, who has been living here for three years with his grandmother, and acts as the night waiting room's guard, cashing in and keeping for himself -- with the agreement of the station's staff -- the 40 rubles (1.4 dollars, 1.1 euros) people pay to spend the night there.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051102/lf_afp/russiasocietychildren
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